Last week I linked to this David Ehrenstein post suggesting that the only Scalia replacement the wingnuts could be happy with would be Scalia himself, as a zombie. It was a joke, of course -- or so I thought until I read this.

26 February 2016

The fall of the House of Bush

It was a pitiful end to a would-be dynasty. Jeb! was supposed to be this cycle's Romney -- the safe, sane option backed by the big money and the "right" people, who would glide to the Republican nomination more or less by default as the various nutballs imploded. But this time the base demanded a nutball, and would settle for nothing less than The Donald. Despite Jeb!'s Presidential demeanor.....

.....and the excitement evident at his campaign events.....

.....he just never got any traction in the polls. Tens of millions in ad spending failed to win him any support or even to take down the upstart Rubio, something Chris Christie accomplished with a few sentences that instantly made "the Rubot" an unshakable meme.

In fairness, dynasties have never lasted long in the US. Think how large the Kennedys once loomed in our politics -- but you don't hear much about them now. And Jeb! chose to enter the Republican arena just as a full-blown pitchforks-and-torches peasant uprising was under way, complete with its ranting, glowering, oddly-orange Marat. In the end he was just one more disconsolate and bewildered aristocrat hauled off by the tumbrels of dismal polling.

I picture his campaign as a hive of activity all going for naught because of failure to adapt to circumstances -- an army of workers and consultants frantically shoveling huge piles of money into toilets, while in back the leaders hunched around their plans, baffled at the Floridian upstart and especially the bloviating billionaire orangutan who had stolen the crown prince's rightful day in the sun, but gamely struggling on with more and more of the same old ads and clichés which, surely, would restore the divinely-appointed order.

But it's over now. There's some talk of a further generation of Bushes being groomed from shrubhood for future Presidential runs, but it won't happen. It's impossible to tell what the Republican party's future will look like in the wake of The Donald, or even whether it has one. But nobody is going to believe that a Bush revival is the answer. The dynasty is done.

24 February 2016

Video of the day -- Game of Trumps

Found via Republic of Gilead. Wouldn't be surprised if we see more and more of these as the campaign grinds on, with The Donald standing in for various villains. In a way, though, he was first inserted into a movie over 30 years ago, since the character of Biff Tannen in Back to the Futurewas actually based on Trump. Just imagine a video like this with Trump inserted into BttF in Biff's place -- it wouldn't work as parody, because nobody could tell the difference.

21 February 2016

Saturday's vote

Nothing sweeter than the looks on Republican faces as the awful reality starts to sink home.....

South Carolina had a clear winner -- a yuuuuge winner -- now the near-inevitable nominee. Trump won the state, all seven of its Congressional districts, and all fifty of its delegates. Cruz did not have a good night. He's the Christian Right candidate for this cycle. If he can't win in a state as Bible-belty as South Carolina, where can he win? Rubio hasn't won a single state yet -- not even close. How is he supposed to get the nomination at this rate? And poor old Jeb! has finally packed away his exclamation point and given up. Sorry, Repubs, it's Trump's party now.

On our side, I'm a little disappointed that Hillary didn't win Nevada by a bigger margin -- but only a little. A win is a win. She'll pull ahead as the contest proceeds.

12 February 2016

Video of the day -- the devastation

This is what Homs, the third-largest city in Syria, looks like after almost five years of civil war:

Knowing the region as I do and having been to Syria, I found this gut-wrenching. With cities in ruins and millions of people displaced, Syria is being destroyed. This war needs to end. And the harsh fact is, wars end when somebody wins them. Right now and for the foreseeable future, the only force strong enough to establish control over the whole country and end the war is the government -- the Asad regime. With Russia's recent intervention, the regime is recapturing territory and regaining control. Yes, this reconquest is itself a brutal process, and Asad is a monster, and Putin is intervening solely for reasons of Russian geopolitical advantage -- but this, not farcical "peace talks", offers a real possibility of ending the war.

(The one other force that might be strong enough to control all of Syria is Dâ'ish (ISIL), but I shudder to imagine the fate of Syria's two-and-a-half million Christians and similar number of Alawites under Dâ'ish rule. It would mean even worse horrors than the war itself. The Asad regime has at least generally not persecuted religious minorities. I wouldn't trust any of the Sunni factions, even the US-supported ones, on that score.)

It's daunting to realize Syria's situation is so dire that Asad is the least-bad option. But that's the reality.

And to those narcissistic Americans who treat the Middle East as a mere stage prop to assign blame or praise to this or that American leader or policy: Stop. Just stop. This isn't about us.

10 February 2016

Fustercluck

For months now Republicans have been doing so much whistling past the graveyard that I'm surprised the dead haven't complained. Trump was a flash in the pan who would fade with time, they said. His support would migrate to "real" candidates as February approached and people got serious, they said. The polls were wrong, they said (a mantra recycled from 2012). Trump's supporters were unmotivated or stupid or historically non-voters and wouldn't actually turn out, they said. At worst, enough failing candidates would drop out to let the non-Trump vote consolidate behind one alternative, they said.

Today they're finally facing the stark horror of reality. The polls were right. The Trumpolines are real people, and they vote. The party of Lincoln, Eisenhower, and Reagan is almost certainly about to nominate a fascist orangutan for the most powerful office on Earth. And there's not a damn thing they can do about it.

It's that latter point that makes yesterday's Trumpstravaganza such a delicious spectacle. There might have been light at the end of the wingnut tunnel if the results had at least crowned a single anti-Trump and pushed others to drop out. But the disorderly clutter of candidates remains as dense as ever.

Great Wingnut Hope Marco Rubio could not, and will not, recover from being batted around like a piñata by Christie during the last debate. He's doomed not only by the magnitude of his blunder but by the fact that its nature lends itself to mockery. Epithets like "Rubot", and analogies to those dolls that play back a canned phrase when you pull their string, now abound on the net. It's like the water-bottle thing but ten times worse. He ended up in an embarrassing fifth place behind Jeb Bush, for crying out loud. But he won't drop out. He still has hope that this is just a setback and he'll recover. He doesn't know he's a dead man walking.

As for Jeb!, his still-massive pile of funds, endorsements, and Bushian sense of entitlement are now bolstered by the hope of wresting the establishment-favorite spot back from Rubio. He'll stay in, despite his toxic last name and cringe-inducing campaign style.

Why would Cruz quit? He won Iowa and came third in a state demographically hostile to him, and there are fundie-rich states coming up which are much friendlier terrain. Never mind his general lack of appeal to non-fundies and the fact that his own party's leaders loathe him.

Kasich might have been on the brink of giving up, but after yesterday's second-place finish, nothing will pry him out of the race. He can, and will, claim that he should supplant both Jeb! and Rubio as the non-crazy alternative to Trump -- even though his image is far too moderate to survive the coming primaries in the South.

Christie is hinting he might drop out (a man with a mission?), but his level of support is so low that this would do little to consolidate the non-Trump vote.

And serene above the strife, in wingnut Nirvana, floats the vindicated Trump -- insults and all. He now faces a succession of states where he holds poll leads comparable to what he had in New Hampshire, with the forces opposing him in worse disarray than ever. He'll win primary after primary while the midgets squabbling around his feet tear each other to pieces.

By your fruits we shall know ye, O Republicans. For years you've cultivated a base mentality of prejudice, paranoia, and panic, and here is the result. Trump knows far better than you how to operate the clown car you've made of your party, and he's jumped in the driver's seat and sped off on a joyride in the damn thing, horn blaring and gears grinding and on the wrong side of the road, and that's the last you're going to see of it until he totals it out sometime between now and November.

05 February 2016

The Trump rebellion -- danger and opportunity

It's easy, but also lazy and self-defeating, to dismiss Trump supporters as purely stupid, crazy, and bigoted. Yes, there's a good deal of delusion and prejudice at work there, and it's very dangerous. But there are also more serious issues involved which we need to understand.

There's a certain view of how the Republican party works which goes as follows. The party's core purpose is to serve the economic interests of the rich and big business. However, the rich and big business by themselves are not numerous enough to win elections. So the party makes a show of passion for certain cultural issues -- religion, homophobia, guns, (coded forms of) racism -- in order to seduce large numbers of culturally-conservative working people into voting Republican even though it's against their economic self-interest.

This view is an oversimplification -- many of those with actual power are genuinely committed on the cultural issues, as the strenuous efforts of Republican elected officials to fight gay marriage and restrict abortion show. Nevertheless it's true that a huge chunk of the Republican voting base isn't enamored of the party's economic policies, and never has been. The party's official zeal for the free market, free-trade agreements, and low taxes for the wealthy -- zeal which practically rises to the level of religious dogmatism -- leaves them cold.

What's changing now is that more and more of these voters are noticing that the party isn't actually serving their interests, and they're angry about it. As to why this is happening now, I think part of it is rooted in the unhinged reaction to Obama's election in 2008. Obama was so demonized by some elements on the right -- including many short-sighted members of the Republican establishment -- that much of the base came to perceive him as absolutely anathema, an embodiment of evil with whom no compromise was possible. The problem with this was that Republican legislators did sometimes have to work with him to get anything done -- avoiding government shutdowns, raising the debt limit, and getting budgets passed, for example. But much of the base was now primed to see such necessary compromise as treason. Reading comments by Trump supporters on right-wing sites, I commonly see this theme -- "the Republican establishment betrayed us by making deals with Obama instead of fighting him at every turn". As absurd as this stance may seem, the fact remains that it's led these voters to look on the Republican leadership as their enemy, making it easier for them to also recognize that that leadership's economic policies really have been harmful.

Aside from that, you can't fool people forever. Decades of tax cuts, deregulation, free-market fetishism, and free-trade agreements have produced an increasingly Third-World-like economy with stagnant incomes, shrinking job prospects for the less-educated, staggering concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny elite, and disasters like the West TX explosion and the Flint MI water crisis, evoking a society in which a wealthy ruling elite views the masses as expendable serfs. Eventually even the Fox-addled teabagger base started to notice all this.

It's the anger over this situation which is fueling the passion for outsider candidates, especially Trump. Most Trump supporters are still confused about who is to blame -- decades of propaganda and crypto-tribal paranoia still cast their spell -- hence the fear of foreigners and anyone "different" that Trump is pandering to. But they do understand that the Republican elite and its free-market fetishism are a core part of what's hurting them. And this matters. It matters a lot.

These people aren't potential Democratic voters, at least not yet. They feel betrayed by both parties -- by Republicans too beholden to big business at the expense of ordinary people, and by Democrats they see as too infatuated with gays, minorities, and illegal aliens, and contemptuous of rural and working-class white culture (and also beholden to big business). But they are potentially reachable.

There's evidence that divisive cultural issues are losing force. Younger people of all classes and cultural groups are less religious, and more comfortable with gays and with a racially-mixed society. The dramatic rise in public support for gay marriage in just the last decade has shown that prejudice can be vanquished with amazing speed when it is confronted properly. As I've said before, the transformation of attitudes about gays is one of the most stunning cultural victories in US history, and it behooves us to study this success and work out how to apply its lessons to other struggles.

And Democrats too need to show that they are on the right side economically. In reality, they already are in many areas, at least in contrast with the Republicans -- Obamacare, raising the minimum wage, defending Social Security and unemployment benefits, etc. But it would be useful, for this election, to zero in on one of the current issues which Trump is exploiting to pull Republican voters away from their leaders. What I have in mind is the TPP. Both of our Presidential candidates oppose it; Hillary needs to do with the same force and fervor that Bernie is already showing. If the Republican establishment manages to squelch Trump and foist a conventional nominee like Rubio or Jeb on the party, the spectacle of that nominee spouting the same tired old rationalizations for free-trade agreements, while the Democrat vows to kill the TPP, could well peel off a lot of Trump supporters.

They realize the Republicans aren't in their corner. We have to show that we are. We can't compromise on racism, gay rights, or separation of church and state, but on economics we can appeal to them just by doing the kinds of things we damn well should have been doing all along.

And if Trump is the nominee, as he likely will be? Well, there are plenty of ways to attack him and he has a tremendous potential to self-destruct, but there is still value in the economic-populist appeal. The Democratic base, too, harbors many who are rightly exasperated at how cozy the Democratic establishment is with Wall Street. Much of Bernie's appeal comes from tapping into this. If Hillary is running against Trump and she remains too aloof from economic populism, there's a risk that Trump could peel off some number of Democratic voters. Only by showing that we are listening, and will act on what we hear, can we neutralize that danger.

At the same time, we need to remember that elections are won in the center. The forces which both Trump and Bernie are appealing to are fervent, but they're in the minority; each man is supported by about a third of his party's base. Neither would be likely to win a general election against a more mainstream candidate of the other party. The moderate majority will reject anything that sounds revolutionary, because it sounds revolutionary. The trick is to address the just grievances driving economic populism without sounding like you want to blow everything up and start over. The people who want the latter make a lot of noise, but they aren't as numerous as they think.

If we can exploit the divisions Trump has brought to the surface, and show enough discontented Republicans where their real economic interests lie, the reward could be the permanent crippling of conservatism in the US. It will be well worth it.

02 February 2016

A muddle that doesn't matter

What Iowa caucuses gave us yesterday was a textbook case of an indecisive result. The Democratic race was effectively a tie, and the top three Republicans were within five points of each other. Yes, Cruz won -- by 3.3%, in a state where the Republican party is heavily dominated by the Evangelical voters he most appeals to, and where the polls had had him ahead until the last-minute Trump surge. The nearest thing to a surprise was Rubio's close third place. TPM has the results as Cruz 27.6%, Trump 24.3%, Rubio 23.0%, with no other Republican even reaching 10%.

But it doesn't matter. Iowa historically has not had much impact on later primaries, and the eventual nominee started by losing Iowa more often than not. Trump still has massive leads in the upcoming states, including New Hampshire, now just a week away. Rubio's showing was strong enough to keep anti-Trump Republicans from coalescing around Cruz, whom the establishment loathes more than it loathes Trump. Trump is still the most likely Republican nominee.

None of the rest matter any more, but spare a thought for hapless Jeb!, with his endorsements and résumé and money-bloated PAC, dead in the water in sixth place with 2.8%. He was supposed to be the Romney of this cycle, the safe sane establishment guy cruising to the nomination after the clown candidates demolition-derbied themselves. But now the clowns have taken over the circus, and safe and sane is the last thing they want. In the last few weeks Jeb! seems to have switched his focus to taking down Rubio, and he couldn't even do that. People are just tired of Bushes, it seems.

As for our side, Hillary is now at 49.89% and Bernie at 49.54%, effectively a tie. Eventually a "winner" will be declared, but aside from a small psychological boost, it won't matter, even with delegates (which are awarded proportionally in Iowa). Bernie will likely win New Hampshire, which borders his home state and where the polls have him ahead. That won't matter either. Hillary's lead in later-voting states is too large to overcome. She's still the most likely Democratic nominee.

Huckabee and O'Malley have dropped out, but the news websites are hardly bothering to report it.

I expect infighting among the top three Republicans to intensify, with Trump further stirring up doubts about Cruz's natural-born citizen status, which could get ugly. It will continue on our side as well, though hopefully everyone (aside from the usual frothing-fringe types) will keep their eye on the eventual need to unify the party and beat Trump, whoever our candidate is.

The race may yet, of course, see some game-changing event. It didn't see one yesterday.

Update (Wednesday): Here's another reason why Trump is still likely to be the nominee. All the establishment guys are fighting to be the "last establishment guy left standing", so they spend their resources trying to destroy whichever one among themselves is in the best position -- which, right now, is Rubio. And Trump sits above it all.....

About Me

Individualist, transhumanist, American patriot, socialist, atheist, liberal, optimist, pragmatist, and regular guy -- it has been my great good fortune to live my whole life free of "spirituality" of any kind. I believe that evidence and reason are the keys to understanding reality; that it is technology rather than ideology or politics that has been the great liberator of humanity; and that in the long run human intelligence is the most powerful force in the universe.